The partners of those in love elsewhere are puzzled by evidence of an emotional life, which, they sense, is greater than the one they see day-to-day in their relationship.
"You’re looking a bit sad at the moment," my lover’s partner said to her one day, as she sat, drying her hair before the mirror in their room. "Is there anything the matter?"
Well….. yes, of course; she’s in love with someone else she can’t be with: there is a whole world of experience and emotion closed to him. He’s seeing the very tip of an iceberg she doesn’t even show him, let alone discuss with him. He’s merely glimpsing, momentarily, the complexities of feelings and needs - desiring and being desirable, shared tenderness, her vulnerability, her excitement and happiness – things she experiences daily; but from which he excluded himself years before by failing to appreciate their importance to her.
The same is true for me: lovely as she is, my wife’s world is a cooler one than I can live in, full-time. Like all men, I need a girlfriend, I suppose: I need attention, admiration, affection, glamour, sensuality, and fun. When my wife decided to relinquish most of these precious aspects of male experience, I found women who positively wanted to give me these things, and receive them back from me: who wanted me to buy them pretty things and then walk out for the evening on my arm wearing them; literally dressed up in my love. Better still, I was lucky enough to meet my present lover, who wants to be someone’s girlfriend, and who was distressed to have discovered, over the years, that her partner didn’t seem to want her to be his.
"You’re looking a bit sad at the moment," my lover’s partner said to her one day, as she sat, drying her hair before the mirror in their room. "Is there anything the matter?"
Well….. yes, of course; she’s in love with someone else she can’t be with: there is a whole world of experience and emotion closed to him. He’s seeing the very tip of an iceberg she doesn’t even show him, let alone discuss with him. He’s merely glimpsing, momentarily, the complexities of feelings and needs - desiring and being desirable, shared tenderness, her vulnerability, her excitement and happiness – things she experiences daily; but from which he excluded himself years before by failing to appreciate their importance to her.
The same is true for me: lovely as she is, my wife’s world is a cooler one than I can live in, full-time. Like all men, I need a girlfriend, I suppose: I need attention, admiration, affection, glamour, sensuality, and fun. When my wife decided to relinquish most of these precious aspects of male experience, I found women who positively wanted to give me these things, and receive them back from me: who wanted me to buy them pretty things and then walk out for the evening on my arm wearing them; literally dressed up in my love. Better still, I was lucky enough to meet my present lover, who wants to be someone’s girlfriend, and who was distressed to have discovered, over the years, that her partner didn’t seem to want her to be his.
How terribly, terribly sad! And yet there’s a contradiction here, isn’t there, which has them over a barrel. One’s sympathies for them evaporate in the face of their stubborn refusal or inability to adapt, in order to meet the needs of someone they are supposed to care for. Neither of them is stupid – even if they weren’t so minded, for their own needs, they could still see what they must do, if they wanted. Instead, they’re puzzled and curious: how is it that we seem so complicated and alive; with sources of happiness and unhappiness, excitement and dejection, which are unknown to them? At the same time, they KNOW, deep down, that they have not put in the work; they simply have not been sufficiently engaged with us for any of these affects to be related to them……
So it perplexes them and challenges them. They gnaw at it, from time to time, like a dog returning to a bone, from which they continue, in vain, to hope for nourishment. In one sense, they would love to challenge us: ‘what is going on in your life?’ my lover’s husband seems to be asking; ‘what is it that’s affecting your emotional state?’ But a part of him simply does not want to know, lacks the confidence to demand an answer; because his enquiry entirely reveals how little he’s done which could make her happy or sad. And they cannot readily admit the existence of an emotional world beyond them. Because if they did, it would immediately reveal openly, not only the hidden bankruptcy of the relationship; but also their own shortcomings: the unacceptable knowledge that they are not, cannot be, what we want and need, since they disqualified themselves.
And here we come to the occasional blow-ups over sex. Finally, in this simpler, less subtle, arena they can express their outrage or disquiet over the secret realm of experience and feeling from which they have excluded themselves.....
I remember taking issue with my wife once. I felt that it was inappropriate for any partner, in any relationship, to come in with someone after a good night out together, and sit down to read the paper alone. It’s more of a commuting activity, I feel; it isn’t conducive, is it, to a shared sensual mood, late on a Saturday night? Other women, I pointed out (translated as: other women I’d want to have a relationship with), would indulge in some gesture of affection with their partner; perhaps one which promised more affection later? They might pour themselves and their partner a drink, slip into something more comfortable, light some candles, pop something languorous into the CD player – and generally do their bit to move the mood from outside having fun, to inside having fun.
"I’m NOT other women!" she protested; which of course is more or less guaranteed to make a man think “more’s the pity”, rather than being sympathetic to her wounded pride.
Funnily enough, an almost identical row took place at my lover’s house. Doubtless haunted by that very sense of an emotional life which did not include him, my lover’s partner was protesting that she did not want to indulge him sexually; that she was unenthusiastic about him or sex, and reluctant to tell him what she wanted in that department.
"I do not know what is wrong with you," he said; "I don’t know why you won’t help make sex work for us."
Her feeling was that he was ten or fifteen years’ too late; perhaps he’d finally woken up to the idea that she might have needs, but sorry, she’d moved on. All she wanted now was to keep him happy by being available to him, now and then, with the minimum fuss – and even that was way more than he was entitled to. She told him in no uncertain terms that there was nothing wrong with her at all: she didn’t have a problem; so perhaps it was him:
"I do not know what you are complaining about," she went on. "I’m fit, I’m available, and I’m sat here, half-naked, in your bedroom, looking fabulous, in very attractive lingerie. Other men wouldn’t dream of giving me a lot of grief - most of them would thank their lucky stars for what they’d got in front of them – not go whingeing on about something else or something more."
He hit the roof.
"What the hell do you know about other men and what they might want?" He demanded.
Ans: quite a lot, of course; but she wasn’t going to be telling him that.
I remember taking issue with my wife once. I felt that it was inappropriate for any partner, in any relationship, to come in with someone after a good night out together, and sit down to read the paper alone. It’s more of a commuting activity, I feel; it isn’t conducive, is it, to a shared sensual mood, late on a Saturday night? Other women, I pointed out (translated as: other women I’d want to have a relationship with), would indulge in some gesture of affection with their partner; perhaps one which promised more affection later? They might pour themselves and their partner a drink, slip into something more comfortable, light some candles, pop something languorous into the CD player – and generally do their bit to move the mood from outside having fun, to inside having fun.
"I’m NOT other women!" she protested; which of course is more or less guaranteed to make a man think “more’s the pity”, rather than being sympathetic to her wounded pride.
Funnily enough, an almost identical row took place at my lover’s house. Doubtless haunted by that very sense of an emotional life which did not include him, my lover’s partner was protesting that she did not want to indulge him sexually; that she was unenthusiastic about him or sex, and reluctant to tell him what she wanted in that department.
"I do not know what is wrong with you," he said; "I don’t know why you won’t help make sex work for us."
Her feeling was that he was ten or fifteen years’ too late; perhaps he’d finally woken up to the idea that she might have needs, but sorry, she’d moved on. All she wanted now was to keep him happy by being available to him, now and then, with the minimum fuss – and even that was way more than he was entitled to. She told him in no uncertain terms that there was nothing wrong with her at all: she didn’t have a problem; so perhaps it was him:
"I do not know what you are complaining about," she went on. "I’m fit, I’m available, and I’m sat here, half-naked, in your bedroom, looking fabulous, in very attractive lingerie. Other men wouldn’t dream of giving me a lot of grief - most of them would thank their lucky stars for what they’d got in front of them – not go whingeing on about something else or something more."
He hit the roof.
"What the hell do you know about other men and what they might want?" He demanded.
Ans: quite a lot, of course; but she wasn’t going to be telling him that.
What we have, in these exchanges, is their mystification in the face of our confidence. They’ve spent years selling us short – and, in his case, putting her down at regular intervals, to boot – so it’s probably puzzling to then find that we have an unshakeable confidence in ourselves as attractive sexual partners. Buoyed by each other’s loving adoration, desire and responsiveness, and especially by our shared confidences and insights, we not only don’t need them and their sometimes bizarre take on intimacy: we can step back from a debate conducted in their terms and assert contrary views with an authority they lack.
My lover B and her partner came to stay (with lots of other people) at our holiday villa during August. I’d taken the whole month off and we couldn’t bear to be apart for so long; but inevitably, there were flare-ups. In our simple pleasure at being reunited, B was almost bound to give me a lot of attention, and after another night of us sitting up late, chatting happily over a glass or two of wine under the stars, her partner snapped: incandescent with rage, he berated her for exclusively bestowing me with her company, and making him look like a spare part. At the time, she felt it seemed out-of-proportion, over-determined: she often goes out without him, she’s always gregarious; and what was to stop him sitting outside with us, over a nightcap, instead of skulking off on his own resentfully? I experienced something similar; with my wife complaining that I was always sat by the pool near to B: though again, our contact was confined to acceptable friendly chat and there was no reason why others shouldn’t join us. Where would we go, at a holiday villa, but the pool?
Here – where it is fed by sexual jealousy and expressed as the righteous indignation of a legitimate partner, feeling obscurely devalued in front of others – here you can see all the anxiety and unease which they can’t ordinarily articulate. It isn’t exactly the worry that we might really be cheating; let alone with each other. After all, they don’t know that, our blameless public manner doesn’t even betray the possibility. Nor is it exactly the fear that we might – and hence need a warning shot across our bows. No, I think the disproportionate outrage from them both stems from the vague apprehension that they were right: there is an emotional life they don’t see; one beyond them and their relationship, to which they’re not privy. They see they’ve missed the boat; that, emotionally-speaking, we’ve moved on. And despite our exemplary behaviour, they notice that someone else has access to that interior world. Someone else values us, gets us, feels good about being with us. They’d stopped doing these things – and now they’re haunted by the suspicion that we’ve stopped even wanting them to try.
